Shallow | Center

Also, Female Broadcast Journalists Are Hired Primarily for their Looks

Here's a little public service announcement for you: I'm going to tell you in one sentence what it took Inquirer TV critic Jonathan Storm an astounding 35-plus column-inches to sputter in today's paper.

Political coverage on television -- and especially on cable -- is marked by naked partisanship and hack reporting that contribute breathtakingly little to the national dialogue we so desperately need but are not getting in these complex times.

Seriously.

Not only did this woefully obvious and completely unnecessary "analysis" make the paper, but Storm somehow neglected to mention that Rick Santorum, one of the unhelpful pundits he cites as contributing to the mindless babble, is on the Inky's payroll. Hell, he should also have thrown Michael Smerconish, who pops up with frequency on MSNBC, under the bus while he was at it. S|C

That's Nice, Coach

The Excellent 'Friday Night Lights' Delves Far Beyond High School Football

ON THE advice of numerous television critics and my perceptive sister-in-law, Mrs. SC and I are working our way through season 1 of Friday Night Lights on DVD. And we're wondering why it took us so long to give this show a shot. Based on Buzz Bissinger's well regarded nonfiction book of the same name, the series follows the fictional Panthers, the football team from Dillon High School, in Texas, where the sport approaches religion. But saying the show is about high school football is like saying The Office is about paper. Friday Night Lights is about how children navigate a world that expects them to act like adults. It's about how powerful and transcendent something as pedestrian and banal as football can be in a faded town that doesn't have much left. And it's about how spouses who both love and see flaws in each other hold a marriage together among a community that has placed them under a microscope.

Scranton Shows the Love ... to Me

Shallow Center Owns the Office Convention, Baby!

A GUY could get used to this. In its roundup of bloggers' coverage of the Office Convention, the Scranton Times yesterday cited my post on Creed Bratton's and Brian Baumgartner's moonlighting Friday evening. Even more ego-puffing, yours truly wound up included in one of NBC.com's video clips from the convention; that's me dorkily holding a water bottle and watching Craig Robinson and Angela Kinsey do an elaborate high-fiving routine. (Cue Jim looking directly at the camera and throwing up a "Can you believe this dude?" eyebrow raise.)

Pay Some Attention to the Man Behind the Camera

Daniels: We're Thinking About Who's Filming Dunder Mifflin

YESTERDAY'S OFFICE Convention activities included a press conference with about a dozen cast members and a couple of crew members, including series honcho Greg Daniels. The cast members were very gracious in handling questions both expected and inane, and up until the very end it appeared as if nothing newsworthy would come out of the event. But then Clark DeLeon, of all people, representing Philadelphia Metro, stood to compliment The Office's director of photography on the show's spot-on, documentary-like look and feel and to ask for whom the doc is being shot.

"That's a reveal we have in the back of our heads," Daniels replied. "But it's too soon."

As DeLeon noted in his question, the camera is one of the show's most important characters. It'll be interesting to find out why this office is being filmed and who's doing the lensing.

The convention continues today, but my work was done last night, so I'm home now. What I'll take with me is the memory of how incredibly nice and genuine those actors were. Seeing them behind the scenes laughing and joking not only with one another but also with the foot soldiers from NBC who were there to help coordinate things was a real treat. Dunder Mifflin's Scranton branch may be filled with sad-sack, resentful types who hate their jobs, but the men and women who play them could not be more different than their characters.

Ain't No Party Like a ... Well, You Know

'Office'-Related Surreality Continues in Scranton

MICHAEL SCOTT would be proud. His officemates at Dunder Mifflin's Scranton branch are clearly enjoying themselves here at the Office Convention. On my way to the U. last night to work an event (the collegiate Office Olympics, whose winners will participate in today's competition at the convention), I had to pass through a tent that had been set up adjacent to my hotel, which is serving as the convention headquarters. Hundreds of fans of the show were partying, local TV was covering it, and there were Creed Bratton, belting out a blues numbers on the stage while playing a guitar, and Brian Baumgartner (Kevin), pouring draft beers for convention goers. I continue to have to ask myself whether this is really happening.

Creed's Apostles

At the 'Office' Convention, Character Actors Get the Rock-Star Treatment

IF YOU don't know about Scranton, Pennsylvania's place in contemporary pop culture, then you, friend, don't know pop culture. The small city in the Keystone State's mountainous northeastern region is the setting for NBC's The Office, and this weekend it's playing host to a convention devoted to the show. Because I've done work for the University of Scranton, which is the site of most of the activities, I'm here lending an extra PR hand. Yesterday morning the Today show kicked off the festivities with Al Roker on campus doing weather cut-ins and nine of the show's actors arriving to jack up the crowd, which consisted mostly of college kids who had been up for hours in anticipation of getting on live TV.

Way to Go, Guys

 BY SUSPENDING Don Imus for two weeks, CBS and NBC have sent a clear message.

That message is: Racism is fine as long as no one complains about it.

Imus's Klan-like screed about Rutgers's women's basketball team, broadcast nationally last week, would have gotten a lesser-rated jock an immediate pink slip. Imus, though, draws listeners and viewers, and so it was only well after the public condemnation rolled in that his bosses acted. In waiting so long, they gave the impression that they are concerned not that their employee polluted the airwaves with racist drivel, but that that they might lose revenue because of it.

Which makes CBS and NBC as culpable as Imus, especially considering that this isn't the first time that his on-air commentary crossed the line that separates offensive from unacceptable.

Bet He Leaves the Seat Up, Too

AS AN engaged parent, I try to monitor the media my children take in and break down the messages they contain. This is not an issue for the 5-month-old, who's too young to be much of a consumer of anything at this point, except for what she's fed, but the 5-year-old watches TV, is read to often, listens to music, and plays games on her PC. And so after this morning's episode of Sesame Street, I'm trying to figure out how to break the news to her that Ernie is kind of, well, a dick. Twice this episode, he awoke a sleeping Bert -- first by singing to him, then by playing his bugle -- in the middle of the night, then went to sleep himself, leaving his "old buddy" wide-eyed and trembling. And that's just today -- in nearly every episode, we see Bert minding his own business, reading a book, say, only to have Ernie barrel into his life, flap his gums incessantly, and annoy Bert to the point of deserving a serious beat-down. Some friend -- he's like that roommate in college who's always telling you "lighten up" and "have fun for once," when all you want is two hours to write a paper so that you don't flunk out. One day Ernie is going to "move away," and then, years later, after Bert has gone off to the great Muppet Show in the sky, someone's going to find a bunch of tiny orange felt chunks in Bert's freezer. And no one who knew the two of them will be surprised.

Putting the "O" in O.R.

MRS. SHALLOW Center is quite a fan of ABC's soapy medical drama Grey's Anatomy, surely the worst good show on television, and so I "watch" (read: am in the same room as she while she's watching) most episodes. A recent plot line has featured George's father being hospitalized at Seattle Grace, where, naturally, things take a turn for the worse, necessitating the arrival of George's entire family to monitor the situation. George is sensitive and passive, and so the producers have given him a couple of testosterone-fueled, meathead brothers, one of whom is played, of course, by ... wait for it ...

Stephen A. Snuffed

THE NEWS that ESPN finally put Stephen A. Smith out of his -- oh, let's be honest: our -- misery devastated me. It's not as if I ever watched his show, but whatever time Smith spent prepping for and taping the show was time he didn't have to write. And the less he wrote, the less unreadable prose there was to slog through in the Inquirer. We can only hope that the network's pledge to have Smith "expand his presence across numerous ESPN entities as part of a new role" comes to pass. As a reporter and columnist, he's painfully out of his league, filing incoherent pieces that defy logic and contain more exclamation points than a 14-year-old girl's diary. Smith is all about Smith, about shouting and yelling, about being "shocking" and "edgy," about trying to outcool cool. He is, in other words, perfect for ESPN, a once substantive network that has succumbed to the disaster of personality-driven media at the expensive of the interesting stories it once told.